Spinoffs can be okay upon occassion but a lot of times you just can't figure out why anyone bothered. Such as....

I'll see you, and raise you....AfterMASH!

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If it's true what they say, that GOD created us in His image, then why should we not love creating, and why should we not continue to do so, as carefully and ethically as we can, on whatever scale we're capable of?

The choice is simple; refuse to create, and refuse to grow, or build, with care and love.

If it's true what they say, that GOD created us in His image, then why should we not love creating, and why should we not continue to do so, as carefully and ethically as we can, on whatever scale we're capable of?

The choice is simple; refuse to create, and refuse to grow, or build, with care and love.

Top of the Heap was spinoff of sorts of Married with Children. Kelly dated a guy played by Matt LeBlanc (who was still a nobody at the time) in one episode and, for some reason, this character got his own show. His dad was played by veteran TV actor Joe Bologna, who seemed extremely angry to realize his career had led to him appearing in a show like Top of the Heap.

The show was built around a single joke: The dad would try to marry the son off to an eligible rich girl in every episode, but it never worked. Ha ha. The show was criticized for its portrayal of Matt LeBlanc's character as quite literally mentally handicapped, to the extent that he could barely even understand what was going on around him. It made his dad seem like a complete monster for using his handsome but dim-witted son the way he did. Top of the Heap lasted six episodes, with a seventh unaired.

One of the worst TV shows of all time.

... but wait!

The people behind the show tried again, retooling it to remove the despicable father character. They replaced him with an even more despicable best friend character! Now, instead of dealing with his sonofab***h father forcing him into all sorts of humiliating situations, Matt LeBlanc's mentally handicapped character had to deal with his best friend being a patronizing a***ole who actively tried to thwart his attempts at bettering himself. The show was retitled "Vinnie and Bobby". This time around, LeBlanc's Vinnie is going to night school, and most of the "humor" comes from his so-called best friend, Bobby, putting him down, sabotaging his studies, and trying to make sure Vinnie never succeeds at anything. Hilarious!

I remember watching exactly one episode "Vinnie and Bobby" and being very upset by it, due to the way the Bobby character treated Vinnie. The show was apparently not well-received and is so forgotten today I couldn't even find any screenshots of it on Google!

Fortunately, Matt LeBlanc escaped from these two hellholes and moved on to better things, like Friends, where he played a pretty but dim-witted character who is condescended to and routinely humiliated by his so called friends. Er, uh, well ... at least he got paid well for that show.

I forgot (or at least tried to forget) most of these shows. I always hate those episodes of a TV show, where you saw hardly any of the regular cast because that episode was an unofficial pilot of a spin-off. It's fine if it's a spin-off of a regular character (Benson, for example) or a guest star in a highly rated episode (Mork and Laverne and Shirley on Happy Days). But I hate it when they create a whole bunch of new characters in one episode and try to spin it off! For example, Sanford and Son had the episode that centered around Grady's family. You already mentioned Top of The Heap. There was also another attempted spin-off episode from Married with Children involving 3 radio D.J.'s at Bud's college. One of them was played by a then unknown Kerri Russell. The audience doesn't understand what's going on! Most of us just wonder, "Where's Al Bundy?" and "Who the hell are these people?" It took years of watching TV to realize that this used to be a common formula. The unofficial pilot was also a step closer to that 100th episode you needed for syndication. Luckily it doesn't happen anymore, the stakes are much higher now days. With so much competition, I don't think a show would risk airing an episode that wasn't based around at least one person in the regular cast.

Saved By The Bell wasn't exactly great to begin with, but I was a kid, and enjoyed it. Then, NBC was looking for new programming, and did a spin-off type show, called Saved By The Bell: The New Class. It brought it new actors to essentially play carbon copy versions of the departing class, just with new names. They kept Dennis Haskins as Mr. Belding, and eventually brought back Screech to be the Assistant Principal.

Saved By The Bell: The College YearsTechnically, I don't know if this is a 'spin-off' or a 'sequel'. Either way, at the end of Saved by The Bell, the kids announce where they're going to college. In College Years they completely ignore this, and not only have Zack, Screech and Slater at the SAME college, but as ROOMATES. Eventually Zack's ex-girlfriend Kelly shows up and lives in the same dorm and they get married.

Masked Rider was a spin-off of the then popular Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series. In Japan, Masked Rider wasn't a part of the Rangers series at all. But when production company Saban bought the rights, they wanted it to succeed as much as possible, so they had the character appear in a couple episodes of Power Rangers before having him have his own show.

The only character I can think of who got TWO terrible spin-offs was Whitman Mayo's Grady from Sanford and Son. I really like Whitman's performance on Sanford and Son (some of the best and most memorable episodes in fact are during the half season where Foxx left the series and Whitman took the lead - wild parsley anyone?) but the two spinoffs were awful.

First there was Grady in 1975, where the character goes to live with his never before mentioned rich daughter and her family. The show only lasted a few episodes and Grady was back in Watts, rich daughter forgotten again!

And then after Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson both left Sanford and Son they tried to continue the series as The Sanford Arms, with some generic characters I can't even remember, plus Aunt Esther, Bubba. . . and Grady.

If it's true what they say, that GOD created us in His image, then why should we not love creating, and why should we not continue to do so, as carefully and ethically as we can, on whatever scale we're capable of?

The choice is simple; refuse to create, and refuse to grow, or build, with care and love.